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An anonymous reader from the Macmod forum wrote in with this appealing hack: "This is one of the coolest mods I've seen all year. Mac Moder EdsJunk submitted this mod to our forums late Thursday night. By cracking open a MacBook he was able to put a second monitor inside of the screen. The end result is sweet. The second monitor can make the Apple logo have any kind of background, like the clown fish, or the flurry screen saver."

If somebody managed to put a screen behind the logo, that means that there was some extra space in the original design. That seems very un-maclike. Apple has, repeatedly, shown a willingness to make considerable design sacrifices in order to shave off a few millimeters.

You could do virtually anything with this mod - as one poster put it, put the image from the camera on it, or you could scroll RSS feeds, put other logos inside the Apple cutout just to screw with people, an animated eye looking around and winking, etc.

Maybe just a toy, but a very cool toy that could easily be very useful.

I really like the idea of an eye looking around and blinking. You could even have it follow your cursor on the screen that you see so you could have it look at people and follow them around the room. Wink on a click.

If this is something you consider commonplace or ordinary, I'd like to know what you'd actually consider impressive or of merit.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a fantastically sexy mod. I don't think it was especially difficult, but then, I haven't cracked one open to check, have I? My point was that the nature of the machine in question makes this mod easier. The kind of thing which actually impresses me, however, is more like the full-custom super-art cases (like the classic HL2 case that was posted and then later duped here, IIRC) which are mighty works of creativity, or modifications which substantially increase functionality. This is just eye-candy, and you don't even get to look at it; in order to make it do anything interesting you have to piss away CPU time. Show me a complete PDA stuck into the case (a cellphone might be easier and would be more useful - is there an expresscard slot in there? you could use that space) which can do this stuff independently and I'll probably be as excited as you want me to be about this.

Someone else said in this thread that this was a 100% jerkoff waste of time that only a Mac fanboy could love. I would put another qualifier on it; it's a 100% jerkoff waste of CPU time that only a Mac fanboy could love. NeXTStep was peppy on MC68040-based computers with like 32MB memory. OSX is a dog on a Dual G5 with 2 GB memory. The major difference I can see between the two operating systems (aside from compatibility changes and some new libraries) is that OSX has a lot more eye candy, emphasis on "candy", while NeXTStep had a professional look which is now dated.

I read the article before the site went down, and the video is very impressive, the screen is recognized as a secondary screen, so you can basically display anything you want on it. In the video it shows playing some videos, an iTunes visualization and the output of the built in webcam (iSight).

I run OS X on a single-processor 1.25GHz G4 with 2GB of RAM and it runs just fine, assuming I keep the number of application I have open at any given time to a small number.

Is that because you're running out of memory, or some other reason?

Does your video card support CoreImage and CoreVideo?

Yes, it did. I don't work there any more. When I quit I left with the Core Duo T2600-based laptop running Windows XP, which was much more responsive.

But really, OS X is a very responsive OS on old hardware. Hell, I had 10.3 loaded on a 266MHz G3 and it ran OK.

I ran 10.1 through 10.3 on a 266 MHz G3, and it did not run OK. I'm quite serious that if you put that next to a NeXTStep-installed Turbo Slab, and run through some basic tasks (author an email, browse some network shares, for example) then you will see that OSX is a dog. Its ancestor is about the same speed at some tasks and faster at most (until you get into big CPU crunching of course) and is running on a system that probably has less than half as much raw processing power as the average video card installed into a G3. The whole thing is subjective, I guess; if you learned (as my mother did) to be happy with Quadras while the PC users were getting processors with at first twice, then ten times the performance (literally) for the same amount of money or less, and running a cooperatively-multitasking operating system that would crash at the drop of a hat (any hat) then I guess OSX seemed fast to you.

I mostly gave up on Apple when they were telling us that we should be happy with 68040-based machines when they could at least have given us an '060 while we waited for PowerPC. I gave up on them completely when PowerPC came out and it was fast for all of about a second and then got dogged by the PC again, and hard - and Apple told us we should pay more for the privilege. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and tried the G3. They fucked up the IDE chip and created UDMA errors with most hard drives. Their solution? Buy an IDE card, or disable UDMA through the use of a third-party commercial on-disk driver (e.g. FWB toolbox.) I then had to use the dual G5 at work, and was completely disappointed.

I've been there with Apple since elementary school. I had an Apple ][+, which I followed with an Amiga 500. During that time I also used a IIci (as a teenager living at home, I had access to my mother's computer which she used to do graphic arts work like typesetting, mostly in pagemaker) a great deal, maintained it, tweaked it, et cetera. Eventually my Ami died and I got an IBM PC-1 with 448kB memory... anyway, the long sad story continues through a couple of Quadras and a Performa-badged Quadra (I forget which model(s) it was) and then a PPC601-based mac. Finally I got a 386DX25, put Linux on it, and said goodbye to all that nonsense. I've installed MacOS5 on a Lisa and all kinds of other useless Mac-related stuff and I sincerely wish I could get all of that time back and spend it on something useful, like studying programming. The amount of time I spent fucking with INITs and CDEVs alone would have been enough for a solid grounding.